Using the IEEEtran class for Robotics conferences

IEEE-RAS provides some LaTeX template files for conferences but:

• The IEEEtran.cls file has somehow been renamed ieeeconf.cls, which clashes with another package actually named IEEEconf and is confusing (IEEEconf is a separate class used for IEEE Computer Society manuscripts).
• The version provided is 1.6b, instead of 1.7
• The sample document uses deprecated commands (\overrideIEEEmargins)

This post is about getting your document to work with the current release of IEEEtran.

ssh at EPFL

By default, EPFL blocks all external SSH access (for example, to your office machine). To access the machine, you must go through a gateway service called tremplin (trampoline).

First, you need to create an account before you can use this server (one-time thing): https://tremplin.epfl.ch/ssh.cgi. You need your sciper number for this, the password is your gaspar password.

Each time you want to access an internal machine as from the outside world:

ssh -f -N -L2222:your_machine.epfl.ch:22 your_sciper@tremplin.epfl.ch
ssh -p 2222 your_user@localhost

Replace the epfl internal hostname with your machine’s, the sciper number with yours, and the username with the username on your local machine (not your EPFL login).

rsync tips and tricks

Transfer a file, resuming if there was any partial progress:

rsync -avzl -e ssh --partial --progress <remote_path> <local_path>